PBW SE5 Huge Combat Replay Files

[geoschmo]

We’ve had complaints from the beginning of SE5 on PBW that occasionally games will generate huge combat replay files that don’t correlate with the level of activity in the game. The most recent case involved a game on the second turn coming back with a 10MB combat replay file where there weren’t even any ships in the game.

I’ve worked with Malfador and I believe we’ve figured out what’s happening. During the game process, the combat replay file exists with a generic name, like “current_replay_combat.cmb”. After the game finishes this file gets renamed with the game master file name on it like the other files related to that particular game.

Where the problem lies is that if more than one game processes simultaneously the potential exists for the game to get confused about which game the current_replay_combat.cmb file belongs to. I had thought PBW was coded to only allow one game to process at a time, however I've recently noticed that, at least for SE5 this is not working and games are running siultaneously. I'm investigating the code and hope to have a fix at some point which will keep the games running one at a time and avoid this problem in the future.

In the mean time, if you have a game with a combat replay file that seems out of whack for the game, let me know and we can remove it from the zip files on the server. That should keep it out of your game for future turns unless it happens to run again at the same time as another turn.

Geoschmo